


Those Lost Days

by BlackjackGabbiani



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types, Pocket Monsters: Black & White | Pokemon Black and White Versions
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-20
Updated: 2016-08-20
Packaged: 2018-08-10 00:49:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7823725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackjackGabbiani/pseuds/BlackjackGabbiani
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ghetsis is said to have simply discovered N in the wild. Yet, how did he know a child would be there? Why does N look so very much like him? And who was N's mother?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Those Lost Days

He came into my life like the crashing tide, a force that couldn't be ignored. Oh he was handsome then, his flowing hair and casual smile and dangerous, glamorous bent making it impossible to attend anybody but him.

His words, though, were the true pull. He had such a beautiful, lyrical speaking manner, and everything he turned his attention to was enrapturing. I'd lived here all my life and I never knew the Unova region was so rich in history and legend! Of course I had heard of the ancient princes and their war, but only knew what had been necessary to pass a class. He made it feel as though I was there in the castle, hearing their arguments, witnessing the final division between them.

"I am a descendant of that royal line," he told me one day.

"Mister Harmonia, are you trying to seduce me?" I asked in return.

He smirked in that way that he had, narrowing his scarlet eyes. "Perhaps."

I clung to our time together. We were frequently apart, as his business kept him busy and traveling, no doubt to some exalted location. When he would come to me, I was in a constant trance. A spell, from his words, from his very being, as though he was a powerful sorcerer. Unsurprisingly, as the world has its ways, I soon found myself expecting. I couldn't wait to tell him, but he was away.

He was always unreachable during those times. I suppose I could have asked where he went, but it never occurred to me to do so. Everything he told me was so entrancing that some part of me believed that he went through history.

I remember the strange day I told him. He had returned from meeting with his fellow scholars, those he referred to with a dance in his eyes as the "sages", and I sat him down to tell him that he was to be a father.

It was the only time I was ever afraid of him. The only time I ever had reason to be.

He stared at me, his mouth tightening, contorting, his brilliant eyes narrowing into a glare, his hands balling into fists, and I instinctively shielded my face with my arms. It couldn't be! I had never known him to be violent, and had he been I cannot say for certain that I could have opposed him at all.

He bolted from his seat and I backed up so quick as to nearly tumble over, but he caught me. "This is wonderful!" As he enveloped me in his strong arms, I chanced a peek at his face, and all traces of that horrible expression were gone, replaced with unbridled joy. "A child! An heir!"

There was that historical wisdom again, present even in his sense of humor. I felt like everything would be all right. That hideous rage, maybe I had just imagined it.

I didn't think that much changed between us over the next several months. He continued his distant research, returning to me only sparingly. Over time I had come to conduct my own studies on the time in Unova's history that so enraptured him, and though I never uncovered anything new to him, he always met it with engagement and attention. And he had begun to address me as his queen. Of course, who wouldn't find that charming? So I in kind called him my king.

And he began to share with me his studies! Not merely the ancient princes, but so much of the court that would otherwise be lost to history. There was a curse on the family line, he said, that would lead to its ultimate ruin. Long before those fated young men, there had been born a child of unusual presence, of an unholy power. Though in body it had been human, it was in being a pokémon. Unova was beset by an overwhelming plague, he said, because that child had turned its fellow creatures on humanity. That phantom child had been scrubbed from history, even its fate unknown, but he had determined that the story was carried in the royal family for generations. It was an ill omen, he said, that reared up again the generation before the lost princes. That child had been snuffed out within days, but perhaps its very manifestation had been enough to call the attention of the fates.

Oh, he told me many other stories of those lost days, but nothing that remained with me quite as much as that, nothing that was nearly as important.

The birth was at home, attended only by him and his pokémon. Pawniard had taken to cutting Bouffalant's mane and arranging it into a nest, both glancing up at the father-to-be as if to ask him when the nest would be occupied. It was a merry time, so I thought, and I was glad to welcome the child, my child, our child, into the world.

Newborn cries rang in my ears like happy bells, and I remember sighing out "My prince..." as his father cleaned and swaddled him. Such a glorious day! Such a beautiful baby!

And then Pawniard knelt down.

I hardly noticed at first. I'd just called the baby my prince, and perhaps Pawniard had as well been entranced with those ancient stories. But Bouffalant have a minimal understanding of human language, and would never be able to understand such details of human life, so when it as well bowed, we stopped.

"This child..." he muttered, staring down at the infant in his arms. "No, it couldn't be." But the scholar in him, the student, pushed his motions. Zweilous materialized, bowing its two heads low. Then Tynamo, then Tympole, lowering themselves as best they could, then Yamask. When he turned back to me, his face was pale, shock written on every line, and a single word all he could muster. "...no..."

For longer than I care to figure, neither of us spoke. We knew full well the implications of this recognition. Our child, the newest remnant of that ancient bloodline, was cursed.

"He will bring ruin on us all." Those words hung heavy in the air, and the chill that must have been shared by the past queen, mother of that doomed second child, as she realized her infant's fate ran through me.

We couldn't bear that our baby would die as well. I leaned against my king, my sage, as he pondered our course of action and I cursed the morality and laws of the modern era.

"They will obey him," he said at last. "If we leave him to be raised by wild pokémon..."

It was a chance at survival, a chance I clung to, a chance that would have been viewed in ancient times as selfishly staking the kingdom itself. For the first and only time, I held my son as we made our way away from the city and into the surrounding woods under cover of night.

We left him there, our child, as his cries, hideous knells, filled the air.

Within a week, I had made the decision to leave Unova. My king and I parted ways then, his work binding him to the area. I was in exile, and I tried to banish the demon child from my thoughts.

The swells of time passed, and news floated in of the brief reign of Unova's young self-proclaimed king, and the sage who had masterminded his rise to power as a means of propelling himself to a mythic role.

But I was no queen. I was simply another vassal of the twice-fallen king.

And yet, I believe that what he told me was the truth. The royal bloodline was indeed cursed, doomed to fall and rise and fall again and again until they lay dashed around the ruins of that region.

But it was not the beast child that held their fate. It was the the true king, the sorcerer who enraptured others with the lies he spun so easily.

Even still, knowing this all, feeling my body ache when I think of what he took from me, I still long for my king to regale me once again.


End file.
